February 10, 2014

Action auteur Dante Lam delivers his darkest work to date with this ghoulish supernatural thriller.

Maggie Lee

A psychodrama set amid funeral parlors, graveyards and creepy old tenement buildings, “That Demon Within” owes as much to Hong Kong’s vintage horror genre as it does to the strong noir style of Dante Lam’s superior cop thrillers “The Beast Stalker” and “The Stool Pigeon.” Working from a real-life criminal case but steeping it in ghoulish Chinese supernatural lore, the action auteur turns a policeman’s battle with a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality into an exploration of the evil instinct latent in everyone. The result is Lam’s darkest work to date, one where violence is not just graphic but ugly, and Hong Kong symbolically comes to resemble a charnel house. It should do gangbusters biz in Asian-friendly genre markets, though mainstream domestic audiences may not embrace the grim content as readily as they did his heartwarming 2013 hit, “Unbeatable.”

Set to open April 18 Stateside through China Lion, “That Demon Within” recalls Lam’s “Fire of Conscience” (2010) in the way it draws on fading Hong Kong folk-religious icons in service of a retro aesthetic. Here, Lam invokes the Demon King, a spirit that is associated with the Festival of Hungry Ghosts and, like the fire dragon in “Conscience,” reps a manifestation of one’s inner darkness.

Shrouded in mystery and superstition from the outset, the film opens with a gang of robbers, known as the Demon King Gang, preparing for a heist by burning incense to their chosen idol — a subversion of a scene familiar from other Hong Kong thrillers, in which police and triads alike pray to Guan Yu, the deity of righteousness. Led by Broker (Liu Kai-chi), the crooks get into a loot dispute with freelance thug Hon Kong (Nick Cheung), who is subsequently injured in a police ambush.

Hon stumbles into a hospital where beat cop Dave (Wu), unaware of his identity, gives him a life-saving blood transfusion — to the chagrin of Inspector “Pops” Mok (Lam Kar-wah), who’s bent on putting the gang behind bars before his imminent retirement. Racked with guilt over having saved a man who callously killed his comrades, Dave starts to hallucinate about Hon merging with him as one; upon learning of Hon’s escape, he believes it’s his destiny to track down and destroy his malevolent alter ego.

Meanwhile, Dave’s supervisor Liz (Christie Chen, cold and stiff), notices that despite his faultless performance, he’s been passed over for promotion and shuffled around precincts due to “personality issues.” She enlists her therapist sister, Stephanie (Astrid Chan), to counsel him, unwittingly opening a psychiatric Pandora’s Box during their hypnosis sessions. Dave’s dramatic arc hinges on a mystery related to his unusually close relationship with his ailing grandmother (Fung So-bor) and his traumatic upbringing by a didactic and sadistically strict father (Chi Kuan-chun).

Lam’s best works have always infused action with stirring emotion, and the fight scenes here, though topnotch, are not even the driving force in what is essentially a character study — an anatomy of a tortured sinner who disturbingly resorts to ritual self-flagellation as a form of anger management. Fire is a key leitmotif (no coincidence that the Demon King is also known as “Spirit of the Burning Face”), as visions of human immolation — which could be flashbacks or nightmares — overlap with Hon’s apparition goading Dave into expressing his savage instincts, dragging him into a sort of mental inferno. Images of swirling blank ink dissolving in water stylishly express the character’s fears and gradual corruption.

Although the film was reportedly inspired by notorious police officer Tsui Po-ko, who robbed banks and murdered his colleagues, Lam has shaped his protag as a tragic figure struggling to hold onto his identity and values. Frequently framed in his squalid housing estate, a lonely prisoner behind metal gates and sealed windows, Dave elicits real sympathy. Wu is initially buttoned-up in a way that recalls his past persona as a heartthrob in numerous romances, but he steadily invests the character with palpable pain and unease, as well as an increasingly gaunt, cadaverous physicality. And even as Dave’s mental condition deteriorates, Lam maintains a riveting ambiguity about Hon, whose terrifying presence suggests that demonic possession is not entirely out of the question; though Cheung takes up less screentime than his co-star, his demonic grin all but devours the screen.

The film achieves a truly Stygian vision through the excesses of the Demon King gang, as Dave, under the apparent influence of Hon, sows seeds of doubt among Broker and his cohorts (Lee Kwok-lun and Stephen Au). But these men need little prompting to stab each other in the back, consumed as they are by greed, and smugly unrepentant as they are about their crimes. Theirs is a profession rooted in the moribund world of undertakers and cremators, and production designer Lee Kin-wai conjures a suitably chilling mise-en-scene of funeral parlors, morgues, coffins and arcane rituals. The banality of such evil is neatly captured by Liu as Broker, dialing down his performance to a very pragmatic level of malice.

Tech credits are exemplary, with particular kudos to car stunt designer Thomson Ng for a Grand Guignol gas-station finale with a blazing symbol of hell as its centerpiece. The primarily nocturnal backdrop takes on a nebulous glow in d.p. Kenny Tse’s subtly lit lensing, though blacks dominate the alternately richly saturated and wanly sepia images. Under the editorial supervision of Hong Kong New Wave stalwart Patrick Tam, Curran Pang’s seamless dissolves and complex montages blur the lines between imagination and reality, while Leo Ko’s unnerving score alludes to Chinese ceremonial performances with its drum and gong combinations.

The Hong Kong cops and robbers genre provides an inexhaustible source of inspiration for imaginative directors like Dante Lam, whose police actioner That Demon Within adds enough horror for a respectable Stephen King novel. He stamps his very personal mark of psychological complexity on the protag, shrilly portrayed by American-born HK star Daniel Wu (The Last Supper) in an eerie but highly effective performance. And the Emperor production does not leave out any of the genre must-haves: shoot-outs in the middle of the street, car crashes, a bit of acrobatics and a beautiful policewoman boss worried about the daredevil hero. With all bases covered, including a bow in Berlin as a Panorama Special, the road is open for diversified audiences to enjoy the fun. The movie is being released in the U.S. and Canada on April 18, day and date with Hong Kong.

A seductive title sequence leads us into the den of the Demon King. Behind the old-fashioned rice paper devil masks are a criminal gang led by Hon (Lam regular Nick Cheung from The Beast Stalker and Stool Pigeon), a cold-hearted villain whose own men hate him. Their latest heist has yielded $80 million in diamonds, which change hands so often in the course of the story, it will take a sharp viewer to keep track of who has them at any given moment.

Watching the film, one has the feeling that the streets of Hong Kong are littered with dead pedestrians who had the bad luck to be passing by when the police opened fire on the bad guys. Lam opens on one of these high adrenaline scenes that leave cars riddled with bullets and dead drivers. (And it’s not the last; a similar scene on an overpass later on in the film is even more spectacular.)

In the heat of the shoot-out, Hon tries to escape on a motorbike, but crashes. Seriously injured, he stumbles into a police station for help, so smeared with blood he’s unrecognizable. There, young cop Dave Wong (Wu) dutifully volunteers to donate blood to save Hon’s life. Obviously a mistake, at least in the eyes of Inspector Mok (Ka Wah Lam), who wants him dead. Hon escapes from the hospital without much ado and from that moment the chase is on.

Now for the psychological interest: Dave is a problem cop, a stubborn loner with anger management and paranoia issues and, we gradually discover, much more on his mind. It’s not reassuring that Wu plays him like a nerdy Norman Bates, walking stiffly and bottling up his feelings. His new boss at work is Liz, a smart, pixie-like beauty (Christie Chen) who tries to stay professional but clearly has a soft spot for the guy. Concerned about his nightmares, violent impulses and some episodes of self-flagellation, she introduces him to her psychologist sister, who teases out his considerable childhood traumas under hypnosis.

Working on his own, Dave stays a step ahead of Inspector Mok as he closes in on the Demon King gang. Lam brings horror elements increasingly into play, particularly a recurrent image of people burning to death as human torches and a truly creepy scene in a funeral parlor. The final apocalypse is unapologetically over the top, but as great to watch as the last burst of fireworks.

Though the cops and robbers are so low-tech they seem retro (there’s nary an electronic device in the story), Lam’s filmmaking team deliver thrills on schedule with solid effects, crisp shooting and fast cutting.

Dante Lam conjures up an inferno in That Demon Within (Mo Jing) a dark twisted trip through one Hong Kong cop’s explosive meltdown. Possessed by the afterlife, Lam’s story plays out in funeral parlours and graveyards where the director’s action and special effects coordinators go about setting the city on fire.

Although it opts for a tricksy narrative with fussy flash-backs and hallucinations delivered in the widest-possible variety of styles, That Demon Within is bleak at its core, a dark, hopeless tale of death, corruption and mental illness shadowed by spectres. Dante Lam is a towering box office presence in Southeast Asia and with Daniel Wu in the lead opposite regular player Nick Cheung the Hong Kong director will test his audience’s appetite for an introspective thriller that blends kinetic action with Taoist superstition when it opens on April 18.

Despite a slightly opaque and somewhat overblown narrative, That Demon Within is a professionally executed production, laden with impressive special effects shots and bone-crunching violence. Some set pieces are particularly innovative, and Lam’s visual manifestations of mental illness are striking. Like Infernal Affairs, two male characters on opposing sides of the good/evil tightwalk lead the charge: Wu as troubled policeman Dave Wong and Nick Cheung as his nemesis, Hon Kong, leader of “the gang from Hell”.

When Hon is injured in a chase during which he murders two policemen, he winds up at the hospital policed by Wong. Not realising who Hon is, the cop donates blood to save his life, an event which begins to tear apart Wong’s carefully constructed world and shatter his all-important beliefs in right and wrong.

It turns out the upright Wong is a copper with a particularly fiery past, and as the dreams, hallucinations and flashbacks mount up, so does the body count - gangsters, family members, policemen, scores of civilians; at times it looks as if nobody in Hong Kong is going to get out of this fast-and-furious film alive.

Much of That Demon Within takes place in the dark including several key action sequences and meetings in the Kowloon Funeral Parlour with “the Gang From Hell”, Hon’s group of robber-killers who use the mask of The Demon King as disguise. Such an extensive use of graveyards, funeral paraphernalia and effigies is unusual for a Hong Kong action film, and may test the superstitious in home markets.

The tortured Wong, meanwhile, is helped by his superintendent and her psychiatrist sister while his efforts to look after his “granny” are prompted by a level of guilt that threatens to crack his fragile psyche, and the film, apart. That Demon Within boasts an inexhaustible visual energy; Dante Lam never lets up and the effects within a single hypnosis montage with its floating scenarios and twisting perspectives, for example, are beyond the scope of many of his Western counterparts across an entire film.